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I have puzzled for years over the church's dark, astigmatic view of sex. But sex is merely the narrow focus. The broader perspective -- and failure -- involves the church's view of women and their role in the world. It seems clear to me that a full, welcoming embrace of women as ordained equals in the priesthood, the hierarchy and the work of the church would refresh the institution, infuse it with new life, energy, hope and purpose.
Strange that the church's leaders, with their intellectual tools and 20 centuries' experience, would fall into what might be called the Fallacy of Incidentals. Women are not ordained priests because Christ, in human form, was a man and chose male apostles. But surely maleness was incidental to the essence of Christ's teaching and importance. Those who build cathedrals of principle, unassailable traditions, around an unimportant or incidental distinction -- one that is rooted in custom of distant time and, interminably preserved, becomes essentially inhuman -- are doomed.
- The continuing damage done to the Catholic Church by the exclusion of women from the priesthood is hard to estimate. What is lost by keeping women out of the full priestly life amounts to a tragedy for the church. In that policy, a world of opportunity has been closed; life that might have flourished, women's souls sharing in the heart of the church, has been shut down.
I hate the doctrinaire reductionism that coarsens all relationships between men and women into trench warfare. As the late Allan Bloom wrote, "The worst distortion of all is to turn love, a relation that is founded in natural sweetness, mutual caring, and the contemplation of eternity in shared children, into a power struggle." Some similar distortion of religion's natural sweetness and profound reciprocity has been too long accepted as part of the Catholic Church's design (male authority, female submission). I suspect that John Paul II feels that if the design is altered now, the whole structure will collapse.
It is not so. The danger lies in the continuing distortion, the airless stasis of a bad tradition. All of this is one reason that I do not go to Mass much anymore.